Tesla ending Models S and X production

The real Tesla engineers must be in all kinds of frustrations getting whipsawed by their chief engineer-designer-physicist-scientist-government economist-savant but probably the stock options assuage that.

Lastly Tesla still doesn’t have real birds-eye view / 360 surround view for parking. It’s year 2026 and even cheaper cars have this.

So L2 is great, the issue is calling L2 "Full Self Driving"

"Tesla Full Self-Driving is twice as safe, so Lemonade takes 50% off every mile driven with FSD."

A company's market cap is, by definition, its fair market value.

> Tesla is not priced according to its underlying assets or technical analysis (e.g. P/E ratio), but solely based on hype/sentiment.

You're right that it's not priced according to underlying assets, but it doesn't follow that it is priced on vibes. Its price is based on potential future earnings; the expectation that Elon can pull off his plans for a robotaxi fleet or building an Optimus robot that might unlock the massive demand for household and/or general use commercial robots. Both offer the prospect of being the first mover into markets which could be worth trillions. It's speculation, sure, but not mere "vibes". The company is also led by a man who has made and delivered on massive, seemingly impossible promises, which adds credibility to the idea that Tesla might actually bring these markets into existence.

i.e. the GigaPress for frames but it just didnt scale like they hoped.

Aren’t model Y and model 3 considered the best cars in their class by most motor journalists?

> Tesla Semi?All but dead.

They’ve been running a pilot all this time, and the factory in Nevada to mass produce them is on schedule. Production ramp is second half of this year. The factory is ginormous.

> The new roadster? Also dead.

Elon said yesterday the unveil is in April “hopefully”

> Full Self Driving? Doesn't exist. Robotaxis?

Cars are driving passengers around Austin now with nobody in either front seat.

It takes automakers almost a decade to bring a new vehicle online, Elon just does it all publicly while everyone else doesn’t take the wraps off until the final 6 months.

Obviously everything is way behind elons hype timelines, but I do still think it’s all coming.

Finally, I know lots of people who own cars, but none who own robots. Many friends will not have Alexa in their homes due to privacy concerns. How many people will trust Elon to have a robot in their homes and assume he's being benign and safe with your personal data?

It really isn't. (1)

Also, what's the first billion dollar market for humanoid robots? Industry? "lights-out manufacturing" exists already, and doesn't require humanoid robots.

Hyundai and BYD (among others) say they're going to put humanoid robots in their factories (2). They won't be Tesla robots. Is this really such a huge use?

1)https://www.topgear.com/car-news/tech/here-are-nine-humanoid...

2) https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvgjm5x54ldo

Companies routinely, exaggerate, obfuscate and mystify investors. Most of investors don't care. The SEC is a joke.

But then you go to defend them as if it were something you're obligated to do. I think you demonstrably do not hate Tesla and Elon as much as the next naysayer.

Uber, the globally available taxi company, is valued 8 times less than tesla. If you are now able to kill all the costs for the taxi driving and reduce the cost for the car also, how much revenue is left?

Robotaxi has to be cheaper than a normal taxi to kill taxis. The margin of that company can't be that much more than a company like uber.

And uber itself will also invest in this, as every other car company. XPeng and co everyone who is building or working on this, will not just idly looking and waiting for tesla to just take 'whatever this cake' will look like.

For me it becomes a complet game changer if it becomes so reliable so extrem reliable, that i can order a car at night, a fresh bed / couch is then in the car and i can lie down while it drives me a few hundred kilometers away.

They have not proven they are waymo level or near it, or that they will ever be there given the lack of lidar.

They may already work better than a Waymo. It's hard to tell. It's certainly there using the public version of FSD. There's awkwardness, but the same can be said of Waymo. What I don't know is how many mandatory edge cases remain to be handled before they can set it free.

Amazon is looking to replace 600k employees over the next decade.

Why do you believe demand for humanoids isn't high?

Uber makes money on every ride.

Teslas Robotaxi has to be cheaper than a taxi with a human and i don't think they will be able to have a lot higher revenue per ride than uber. Not 9x

And if Tesla starts to deliver a robotaxi, all of this revenue has to be shared between taxis, uber, Tesla, Waimo, Zoox, Rimac, Cruise, Baidu, WeRide, ...

So how huge is the market for Tesla to be valuated 9x higher than Uber?

We can even combine a big car company, a robotics company, a solar roof company, battery storage company, ETruck and a robotaxi company and STILL don't get to the same valuation than Tesla currently has.

Teslas share price is math for stupid people.

Waymo is already there, just needs to scale and they are already cooperating with Uber.

>public transit

Unless Musk develops the shrink ray it will never compete with actual high throughput public transit, for the same reason if jets flew themselves we wouldn't commute by air. The cost of drivers per fare is less than in a private car, so the benefits for a bus are lesser. Modern metros are already autonomous.

So when I hear they're cancelling the S and X I can't even picture which cars we're talking about.

Of course, that doesn't mean they had to discontinue those lines.

Maybe the wisdom of having a 'full lineup' is wrong and has to do with making dealers happy.

On the other hand, having 99% of your sales be 2 very similar vehicles seems questionable strategy.

Musk reeks of scam. But for a stock pump and dumb scheme there sure are a lot of teslas on the road.

Besides EVs, Tesla's long term revenue could very well be in the supercharger network, too. It's not as exciting as self driving cars, but the oil companies have been the most valuable companies / stocks worldwide without being exciting like that. I mean I don't think EV charging will be anywhere near as big as oil because it doesn't involve nearly as much infrastructure or international trade, but it's still big, especially if governments refocus on replacing ICEs with EVs.

(the focus has been let go because the subsidies were too popular and expensive)

The actual sales figures show otherwise, but sure, there's still a lot of uncertainty with regards to batteries / range, I can imagine even moreso in the US. Traveled to Austria a while ago in an EV (~1000 kilometers), we had to stop 3x on the way, but the battery was good for another 2.5 hours of driving after a coffee. I keep hearing that "solid state batteries are around the corner" and they will solve all problems with capacity and safety / fire risk, apparently. I'll just sit and wait patiently, it'll take years before their production capacity is on par with current battery tech.

Tesla’s doesn’t really have a complex strategy at this point, they are getting squeezed out of the high end by legacy automakers where their lower cost batteries don’t matter as much. They are absolutely fucked on the low end as soon as Chinese cars enter the picture.

So self driving is really the only option to sell any long term upside to keep the stock from tanking. It’s not a very convincing argument, but you play the hand your dealt.

This despite the 2025 support by the Chinese state for the Chines EV industry now being almost nothing.

  By contrast, defenders of China could point out that the data show that subsidies as a percentage of total sales have declined substantially, from over 40% in the early years to only 11.5% in 2023, which reflects a pattern in line with heavier support for infant industries, then a gradual reduction as they mature.

    In addition, they could note that the average support per vehicle has fallen from $13,860 in 2018 to just under $4,600 in 2023, which is less than the $7,500 credit that goes to buyers of qualifying vehicles as part of the U.S.’s Inflation Reduction Act.

but the arc of less subsidies is clear.

Why hasn't the cheap car been designed yet then?

So the literal opposite of the Cybertruck, which was released less than a year ago.

It's just not a good truck.

It's also suffered from being insanely overhyped, and then underdelivering on basically every front.

---

Part of my problem with modern Tesla is that they seem to have really jumped the shark on delivering products that are functional. Across the board - from autonomous driving, solar roofs, power walls, Cybertruck, Semi, etc... Even the mass manufactured lines like the Y get staggeringly bad reliability ratings and reviews.

Good form is great! Good form at the expense of good function is not.

If you drive a truck because you need a truck, then Cybertrucks don't really work.

That being said, I think a lot of people are in the first category.

The second category people have things that can be fit in a normal truck, but not a Cybertruck.

But not like that.

(Also, the problem is "Americans love trucks"—the Cybertruck doesn't solve that. It's still just a lethal grocery-getter in suburbia where the Cybertruck was only going to sell anyway. I'd sooner get behind the new golf-cart craze in suburbia—let them drive their golf carts to Costco.)

Really? I tend to see much more aggressive acceleration from people in electric cars (including myself when I'm driving, though I try not to). I've been putting it down to people being used to how gas cars seem to be working harder when you ask them to accelerate heavily, while electric just goes with no complaints.

As far as I can tell, the number of humanoid robots doing anything productive is zero. It's all demos.

This is far harder than self-driving. As a guy from Waymo once said in a talk, "the output is only two numbers" (speed and steering angle).

Also, there are at least 18 humanoid robots good enough to have a Youtube video. Tesla is not the leader.

Remember the "cobot" boom of about five years ago? Easy to train and use industrial robots safe around humans? Anybody?

I'm not saying this is impossible, but that it's too early for volume production. This will probably take as long as it took to get to real robotaxis.

"Since we failed on self-driving since 2016, robotaxis since 2020 (1 million on the road), and ASI since 2023, we might as well start on failing on robots now".

But I recommend listening to those calls, start 5 years back; because on reddit but also here, you get wide eyed awestruck people who say 'ow optimus is december this year! ow self driving everything in september!'.

> MUSK: Yeah. But I think self-driving cars is essentially a solved problem at this point, right? And Tesla’s rolled out a sort of robo-taxi service in a few cities, and will be very, very widespread by the end of this year within the U.S. And then we hope to get supervised full self-driving approval in Europe, hopefully next month.

Source: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IgifEgm1-e0

Honda is going to come out with a new Civic next year. It's going to look like the old Civic.

Tesla is trying to create self driving taxis to make the rest of the auto industry obsolete.

If you think that can happen, they should be worth more than the rest of the industry.

X kind of works. XAi kind of works. You can say it is all kind of broken but it works. People predicted X will collapse just a few months ago!

StarLink is really popular now, and it didn't exist few months ago.

He can still do things. People are betting on that.

Now if you ask me, Tesla is still his biggest moneymaker and collapse of Tesla sales will be catastrophic for his empire.

I will say, though, that there is a longstanding tradition, certainly in the United States, of an in group hurting their own material interests to deprive an out group of that same thing. https://www.marketplace.org/story/2021/02/15/public-pools-us...

The people behind the Diesel won and now are moving the money flows their way. See GM stock.

I agree that Tesla has clear strengths, like the vast amount of data they've collected from their cars, and their charging network, but it's also obvious that something is going very, very wrong with that company. The stock value is not reflecting that.

Loads of people trusted Huawei, even after all the hyperbole about backdoors for the government. It needed regulators banning Huawei to knock their share of the market and protect the homegrown spyware.

That sounds literally like a religious mantra. Do rational investors have 'faith' in the Costco CEO? Do they even know his name on top of their head?

Also, fun fact, I do own a Xiaomi 13T and I'm absolutely happy with my phone.

S 3 X Y

The C didn’t fit that, nor would a 2. Unless he’s aiming for a lineup of products that has you seeing someone next Tuesday.

The traditional fix for this is to license the technology and do manufacturing for another carmaker to brand.

It's super common for brand X of car to actually be a rebadged Y with slightly different shaped body panels.

However, it only works if your product is good and you have decent margins. That means you have to compete with china cars, since the obvious thing for a western brand to do is to rebadge a chinese designed car and split the margins with the chinese designer/manufacturer.

Now if you ask me if the German car managers are better I doubt it. Gassing apes by Volkswagen in US is on the same level as Elon. Mercedes guy was complaining about lazy workers too much. Only BMW guy was able to keep acceptable silence. Overall German equivalent of model Y is at least 20000€ more expensive than Elon‘s car.

Personally I don’t buy anything from China if I can. I am not brave and as the Ayways story showed clearly, that great Chinese car can quickly be without any service. Maybe it’s ok to lease such car for couple years, but I don’t want to have car after small accident for what no replacement parts are available.

Design is subjective (I like it), and build quality. Not sure, I don't have issues with mine except one where after 2 years frunk latch started failing. It was replaced in an hour when I went to service center.

Teslas are the cheapest EV for the features offered in Europe. I would gladly buy another car, but they are either more pricey, or lack features. (I did market research 2 years ago when I was buying Model Y, the closest one was ICE - RAV4 for similar price, but I didn't want ICE).

Maybe the more recent models, like the Xiaomi thing, are better. But at the moment, Tesla is at least on par, if not better. The brand being tainted is very relevant though.

Plus there are plenty of popular options for high-end EVs that are far more glamorous as well as practical than the Cybertruck.

Tesla as a car company seems dead-set on a continuous downward spiral.

Maybe the switch to robots will pay off and you'll be right. Somehow, I'm skeptical.

No-one (serious) thought there was a market for the cybertruck.

The stock price is pure madness, it's like it's priced in robotaxis, but that's clearly not going to happen for Tesla. And if it did, it would be a small-ish market, their brand has become toxic in so many big markets.

If Tesla needed beta testers for things they hadn't figured out yet there would have been better ways to go about that.

If this is true that's not what Musk was saying beforehand.

- be smaller

- have an actually usuable truck bed

- be painted (so rust isn't an issue)

- have a body that's not literally duck taped together in some places and can easily snap in others

- use steel (which bends) for body construction

- be suitable for towing hauls

- not be ridiculously overpowered (...to the extent where engine can overpower the breaks)

- have good visibility with a windshield that isn't at a sharp angle to the ground and body geometry which doesn't maximize blind spots

- not have sharp corners that the cut you or doors that can decapitate your dog

- have door handles that make doors openable in case of emergencies/no power situations/electric shorts

- not have bulletproof glass (WTF, "for the masses"?) which makes makes it harder to rescue people when accidents happen

- be easily repairable, or at least amenable to repairs in local non-Tesla shops, with customers being confident it their warranty won't go poof (as the law requires)

- be easily customizeable for different applications (particularly when it comes to the bed)

- not look so different from other trucks without any reason other than "Elon Musk wants to be edgy": ugly is subjective, being a billionaire's fashion statement isn't

...to start. That's off the top of my head.

And, of course, being priced for the masses, which doesn't just happen. It's a design requirement.

As it stands, the Cybertruck is, and has always been, a rich boy's luxury toy — and it was designed as one.

It really seems like something got to Musk's head that he thought the world has so many edgy rich boys.

You want to see a modern truck "for the masses"? That's Toyota IMV 0, aka Hilux Champ [1]. Ticks all the above boxes.

And hits the $10,000 price point [2]. A literal order of magnitude cheaper than the Cybertruck.

Speaking of which: a car "for the masses" isn't a truck. It's a minivan (gets the entire family from one place to another), it's a small sedan/hatchback (commuter vehicle), a crossover/small SUV to throw things, kids, and dogs into without having to play 3D Tetris in hard mode.

But not a pickup truck, which is a specialized work vehicle.

The masses aren't farmers and construction workers (most people live in the cities, and only a small number needs such a work vehicle).

The popularity of The Truck in the US is, in a large part, a byproduct of regulation which gives certain exemptions to specialized work vehicles.[3]

That's not even getting to the infrastructure part: trucks shine in remote, rural areas. And while one can always have a canister of gas in the truck bed, power stations can be hard to find in the middle of the field or a remote desert highway.

But again, it's not impossible to make a truck for the masses (at least for certain markets). That's the $10K Hilux Champ.

For all the luxury aspects of the Tesla sedan, it's been one of the most (if not the most) practical electric vehicles on account of range alone. It also looked like a normal car at a time when EVs screamed "look at me, I'm so greeeeeen!" from a mile away (remember 1st gen Nissan Leaf or BMW i3?). It was conformal and utilitarian, while also being futuristic and luxurious enough for the high price point was fair for what was offered.

The public image of having a Tesla was good: you are affluent, future-forward, and caring for the environment.

The Cybertruck went back on everything that made Tesla a success: it's conspicuous, impractical, overpriced, and currently having publicity rivaling that of the recent Melania documentary.

It was not a risky bet. It was an a-priori losing bet. The world simply never needed as many edgy toys as Musk wanted to sell.

And driving a car shaped as an "I'm a Musk fanboy" banner really lost its appeal after a few Roman salutes and the dear leader's DOGE stint.

Overly optimistic engineering assessments? Perhaps, but they are much further down on the list of reasons of Cybertruck's failure.

[1] https://www.roadandtrack.com/reviews/a45752401/toyotas-10000...

[2] https://www.motortrend.com/reviews/2025-toyota-imv-0-pickup-...

[3] https://reason.com/2024/02/02/why-are-pickup-trucks-ridiculo...

https://insideevs.com/news/784715/tesla-cybertruck-ev-sales-...

I don't know to what extent that's still the case. But someone always ends up with the hot potato no matter what.

At this point, investing is exacly like playing slots at casino.

Steve Jobs had a cult of personality as well. Of course Apple had financial reasons to support its valuation when he was leading it in the 2000s

The legroom in my son's VW e-Up! is markedly better, despite it being a smaller car.

Also not sure what the point of the "old state" part of the parent comment was. Renault is just another big carmaker.

Actions speak louder than words, and the fact that a 'cybercab' production line is firing up this year is also a strong indicator - the fact they didn't do that 5 years ago means tesla leadership didn't think it was going to work back then. 'cybercab' wouldn't sell well as a 2 seater if it couldn't self drive. (although the actual mass production will be delayed till next year is my guess, but we'll see model 3 or y being used for a taxi service in the meantime)

It always goes back to my long standing belief that we need dedicated lanes with roadside RFID tags to really make this self driving thing work well enough.

Every time you pit the sheer violent force of end to end backpropagation against compartmentalization and lines drawn by humans, at a sufficient scale, backpropagation gets its win.

Also, you need a breakdown of the failures as wear and consumables (washer fluid low, splits in wipers, headlight alignment, mobile phone holder in wrong location) can be a failure but would not be a good indicator for lack of quality.

Good though: If you are in an accident Teslas are the safest car one can buy

https://www.ancap.com.au/media-and-gallery/media-releases/22...

> The Tesla Model Y achieved the highest overall weighted score of any vehicle assessed by ANCAP in 2025, recording strong performance across all areas of occupant protection and active safety technology.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/autos/news/nearly-half-of-tesla-mo...

"Most of the issues involve critical components like brakes, lights, and suspension. Many cars fail because of play in the steering or faulty axles. These are problems rarely seen at the same level in competitors like Volkswagen or Hyundai."

Tech level, I agree--that's FSD.

But even if we had that tech today, Mom ain't sending the car without getting a police visit.

You can't even let your kids go to the local playground alone anymore. They're not going to be captain and first mate alone in a vehicle if the Karens have anything to say about it.

Oversupply is in legacy ICE displacement due to rapid domestic EV penetration. "Zero-milage used car" accounting trick is primarily to export excess capacity of gasoline cars (now that EV has taken over) that aren't moving domestically anymore. MOST of PRC exports are ICE, IIRC 60-80%, there's plenty of global demand for ICE still. Pushing domestic sku new car with crushed domestic demand as "used" exports where there's plenty of demand = meet sales target, but less through discounts but import fees engineering - used cars circumvent import duties, certifications, warranty requirements etc. It's a lifehack to unload domestic ICE inventory, not EV. This also likely transient effect because NEV transition in PRC happened so fast ICE manufacturer that target domestic market caught flat footed. They need a few years to either retool to EV or shift primarily to target export markets that still has appetite for affordable gasoline cars.

This is the keyword here, just because the other approach is harder does not mean it is impossible.

It's a decent gamble to try and do things the hard way if it is possible to be deployed on cheaper/smaller hardware (eg: no lidars, just cameras).

But if FSD had the same rate, people would be losing it.

I think it's got something to do with an innate belief to self-determination. It's fine if I make a mistake to kill myself, and it's not fine if someone else does. It's super not fine if someone dies at the hands of a rich person's technology. Outrage, lawsuits, "justice."

CCD and CMOS sensors can easily work in sub-freezing temperatures with various kinds of heating. There are 10's of millions of surveillance cameras installed outdoors in sub-freezing climates that work fine.

Cameras also have moveable IR cut filters, which is analogous to your sunglasses example.

Human eyes do have greater dynamic range in the visible light spectrum, but solid state sensors can commonly interpret light above 1000nm, and of course you can do thermal/IR imagers to provide optical sensing of wavelengths outside of what a human can see.

Sensor technology relative to the human eye isn't what is holding FSD back.

I knew a guy with no arms who drove with his prosthetic hooks. Of course he can feel vibrations and things through his ass, but so could the car if they wanted. Do they use accelerometer data? (I don't know the answer to that) Do they have ABS sensors that can detect wheel lockup/speed status? Because I don't.

I believe I can drive a car to the legal standard, remotely, with a good enough camera array.